Threatening Language Threats and Worse

Threatening Language

Threats and Worse

Legal systems such as those used in the United States and Europe make a clear distinction in criminal law between what people say and what people do. This is not to say that legal systems are positing that words cannot do harm, but rather that there is a distinction in the harm that is caused by words and other actions. However, while this is a legitimate legal distinction, within linguistics and related fields such as psychology, the distinction is much less clear (or useful): There is no equivalent bright line outside of the legal field. Rather, there is a continuum from threats to other kinds of violence.

Individuals who work in situations in which there are commonly overt threats to harm either self or others become skilled at ascertaining the ways in which threats can slide into physical violence. This thus provides a rich field of potential data for linguists, and one that does not seem to have been used to its full capacity. For example, first responders and medical staff who work in emergency rooms have to be able to make accurate assessments of whether an individual's verbal threats are likely to become anything more than that. Their own lives or lives of others may depend upon this. Novak & Hubbell (2002), for example, note that there is generally not a linear progression from verbal threat to physical assault.

Rather, there is a highly typical pattern of assault that follows this pattern: Trigger, Escalation, Assault, Recovery, Post-Crisis (p. 98). Being able to assess where an individual is in this cycle is key in being able to understand how threats and physical violence are connected to each other. There tends to be a cycling back and forth between physical and verbal escalations, so that verbal threats are mixed in with increasingly threatening body language, then this is added to another layer of verbal threats, which then feeds into increasingly physical threats, etc.

Thus when considering a linguistic analysis of threats and their relationship to physical violence, linguists must attend not only to proxemics such as body language but to the trigger that initiates this cycle (Novak & Hubbell, 2002, p. 99). Brewster (2000), looking specifically at the question of how threatening language and physical violence are related in intimate relationships. Looking at hundreds of individuals involved in intimate relationships that included verbal threats, some of which went on to include physical violence, she also found that there is a clear cycle of dynamics between the individuals, in which verbal threats generally intermingle with physical violence and in which certain actions such as stalking bridge the difference between threats and action, since stalking can be considered to be an expressive act more like speech (that is, threats) than like physical violence.